Posted
by
Soulskill
on Saturday November 01, 2008 @09:36PM
from the going-going-gone dept.

KKnDz0r writes "Australian technology and gaming site 'Atomic' raises an interesting question about the dangers of MMOs that go bust. Are they part of a new breed of games that render themselves completely useless and without value if the parent company goes belly-up? It certainly seems that way in some cases, with Fury and now Hellgate: London both going to software heaven, leaving a player base holding relatively useless client software."
While it's certainly not an issue for the large, continuously successful MMOs, we've lately seen a huge influx of companies trying to grab a slice of the MMO pie, some of which will inevitably fail. It would be great to see a dying company at least open up the server software, but how can we give them incentive to do so?

It would be great to see a dying company at least open up the server software, but how can we give them incentive to do so?

That's easy. Buy the code from them. If it's not already owned by a parent company, you can probably get it for fire-sale prices. Chances are that it's already legally the property of creditors though-- purchasing or even renting the servers necessary to launch an MMO is an extremely costly venture, let alone the costs of payroll and development.

Or, we gamers could never pay for something that depends on the goodwill of the manufacturer to function. Buy Software? Sure. Rent services such as MMOs? Sure. But I don't understand why anyone would buy software that requires a service to function. This seems like a case of had it coming.

The initial cost pays for the software development costs. The monthly fee pays for ongoing development and server/network expenses which can be considerable. That's why it's there. Some software have low enough costs that it can be sold for a low price or even for free, with the catch being the monthly fee. Others will usually heavily discount the initial purchase cost after a while when they've recouped most or all of the cost. Companies do it all different ways. Some (Anarchy Online) even dont charge monthly fees to get people into the door, but if you want the perks of the expansions, you gotta ante up.

It's a sensible thing, and frankly, the monthly fee is much cheaper than anything else you could do to entertain oneself for a whole month.

You could say the same thing about any ongoing endeavor. Verizon could sell network access at 100 dollars for build-out + 50 dollars a month upkeep. ESPN could charge 30 dollar development + 10 dollars per month for access to their content online. You don't see ISP's (successfully) charging 4 months worth of fees to cover their cost of building out their data centers, do you?

It's all how you recoup your initial and ongoing development expenses. Those should be together under the same heading! Unless a

Thats the way all the Nexon games work, and all of them are absolute hacker fests.....read the forums for any of their games, and you will see 75% of the posts on their forums are hacker issue related.

You pay $50 because you're getting the game pretty much right when it comes out and you're paying to get it right away. If you waited a bit, you'd only pay $20 for the initial cost once the price for the client software goes down. Since almost all MMOs give you a "free" month when you buy the software, if you're willing to wait you're essentially paying $5 (assuming a $15/month fee) for the installation media and manuals.

No, what you describe is fine. It costs money to have a physical box produced and put on shelves. The first month is typically free when you buy the box.

What I get pissed off by is how they charge you to 'enable' multiple expansion packs for your account. Take, for example, WoW. If you wanted to play that, you would need to get WoW classic (~$20), the Burning Crusade (~$20, you won't use this much after you level 60 - 70), and Wrath of the Lich King (the new 'endgame' where most people will be spending thei

I paid $50 for WoW when it came out and I think $40 for BC when it was released. The prices have consistently dropped. I've seen the Battlechest (WoW + BC) on sale for $30. I think it's pretty likely that Blizz will release a combined WoW + BC for cheaper once Lich King has been out for awhile.Most of the new players I've seen have purchased just the original game and waited until hitting 58 before getting BC. If you are a new player there is still a ton of content in the first 60 levels.

you miss that those who started out early paid $40 for the game, $40 for the expansion and $15 for all the months in between... And probably $50 for the next one, even though we've had an account the whole time.

If so many MMOs are failing WITH charging for the initial software, what are the market chances for an MMO that starts out that much more in the hole?

MMOs are an economy of scale -- the development costs are going to be similar whether you get 20k subscriptions or 2 million. If you spend $30-50million developing an MMO, by the time you pay for development costs people may have already moved on. Or you take so long paying for the initial game you can't afford to work on an expansion until after people have l

The first "M" in MMO means you need a lot more computing power and bandwidth on the server side than for a FPS server with a maximum of some 10 players. So even if the software company gave away the server software, it might be a bit too expensive for the average fan to run his own server for some 1000 players.

But a MMO vendor could still gain some goodwill by including the server software, thus ensuring there can be at least "small" freeshards once the official servers are closed.

What you're describing is an issue of distribution-- the developer can't help it if the publisher insists on doling out regional rights, or throws other obstacles in the way of players looking to get into the game.

World of Warcraft is not something to be seriously competed against-- its multi-million subscriber base is a gigantic anomaly, in an industry where 250,000 subscribers is still a prodigious number. Buy-in for end-users is low enough that you can have simultaneously active subs on several games for under $50 USD per month, which is less than a lot of people pay for TV.

And while I don't care for Stormreach either, it certainly hasn't failed yet. Failures are actually extremely rare in the industry-- a bad game can last a very long time, if the publisher is determined to squeeze every dime they can out of the last few tens of thousands of subscribers that haven't moved on to something else. Even games that have failed spectacularly out of the gate (Anarchy Online, Age of Conan, or Vanguard, for example) can limp along for years, or rally behind tightened code and newly released expansion material.

I don't think freemium MMO's work. Hellgate London is an example where you could still play the game while off line. You could play online with some restrictions for free, or you could pay money for some minor improvements. Granted the game was buggy, but I even with a perfect game most people would have just played for free.

I definitely agree. It's quite similar to old-school shareware games, where you get the first 'episode' or chapter, or whatever for free, and have to shell out for each of the later ones in turn. Many people just stuck with the freebie, and played it over and over again.

Western 'Freemium' (I like that term) games these days seem to work on an Annoyware basis. Hellgate and Dungeon Runners both rely on a glut of subscriber-only equipment dropping for both subscribers and free-players, but Hellgate took it t

If a MMO goes down, what does the creditors gain by keeping the severside code secret? I mean like after the chance of the code being bought by another group goes down the drain. Is there still an economic rationale?

Oh wait, silly me. Release code for free, and your competitors (which includes open source) could create something that carves a significant piece of the MMO niche, and that's unacceptable unless you totally ditched that market.

I've had legal dealings roughly 30 times with people who are not the original creators, but own something 'IP'ish - either because they are the heirs of an estate, or because they got it in lieu of normal payment for debts. Over half those times, the new owners seemed to seriously overvalue the item, and by seriously, I mean thinking it was worth its weight in flawless blue white diamonds. Creditor/Debtor relationships seem to be a bit less skewed in this respect than estates, but it's still pretty common.
If you look at the financial history of the great depression era, particularly with regard to magazine story and sheet music rights, there are huge chains of companies which got awarded assets upon their debtor's failures, and held out for way too much in turn, even as they were going bankrupt themselves. There are chains where the property was transferred by a court ordered bankruptcy times 25 times in a decade, which would mean the average case for them was a company ignoring all offers for a work even though they faced bankruptcy within, on average, less than five months. We know the offers happened, because the courts used that fact to evaluate how to split assets among multiple creditors equitably. Even if you believe we aren't currently in anything approaching a full scale depression, that still looks like a good model of what to expect today.
There's a semi-fair chance that a receiver will realize that taking 5 cents on the dollar for the server code is better than any other deal they might get. But if not, expect them to set the price like the MMO is a sure fire World of Warcraft killer, plus some.

That's easy. Buy the code from them. If it's not already owned by a parent company,

Usually it is owned and so mired in ownership issues that is would be useless if the "owner" wanted to release it.

I worked for a...da da daaaaaa...DOT COM and between EDS, who had an agreement with us, Washington Mutual, who was acting as our white label credit department, and venture capitalists in South Korea and Europe, our technology was so tied up in who actually owned it, no one could even claim the authority to shut down the web site. The company is gone, but the web site is still active hasn't been updated since 2001, and the host is still being paid by some financial shell organization who has received instructions to do otherwise. Why, because noone has clear legal authority to do so.

Now, can you imagine what happens to the servers and code of companies that go belly up and why most can't, even if they wanted to, open up the system, or at least provide a free license to operate servers without them?

At least a few people get this very important fact. I hate that HG:L keeps getting lumped in with MMOs and pointed at as a story about how MMOs fail.

HG:L didn't allow LANs to prevent piracy. Diablo II was pirated out the ass, and all it took was making a few copies of an original disc and viola, LAN parties. It was great for college students. And since the HG:L crew came from the Diablo II world, they knew that.

They just picked a total cluster-frak way of trying to deal with it, and then making it a sub

BTW, what is it with/. and the rendering of apostrophes? Is it just me, or Firefox, or what?

If you type on a non QWERTY keyboard, such as most of those in Europe, there's a good chance you're using the "wrong" apostrophe. On my German keyboard here for example, there's the "real" apostrophe on shift # (just left of the enter key), as well as the backtick/foretick key beside ß (which also doesn't display correctly, like this - ÃY). Slashdot doesn't handle a great deal of characters that aren't standard ASCII, which includes the foretick (renders as Â). Oddly enough, the backtick renders fine - `. It's pretty common for people in Europe to type the foretick rather than an apostrophe character, because it's easier to reach and you don't have to press shift on most layouts, whereas for an apostrophe you do. It's still wrong though, and looks hideous in a lot of fonts, even when it does display correctly, so I'd advise training yourself against it. In the case of copy/paste (I noticed it happens for you when quoting), be careful that the characters you're pasting in are correct, as the simple act of copying from a webpage may mess things up depending on the clipboard system in use (I seem to have no problems here using English language MacOS X 10.4 with Firefox 3.0.3, but potentially different combinations may be an issue)

I notice the foretick I've typed here doesn't render the same as your "apostrophe" however, so I wonder if you're typing yet another different character. As you can see from this post, I've used a fair few "real" apostrophes and they all show fine.

Despite my claims about the foretick/whatever-else not looking right and that you shouldn't use them as apostrophe, I ALSO think Slashdot needs to hurry up and actually support all of these characters (I mean come on... Unicode is NOT hard), because it's REALLY annoying to have to type things like K&ouml;ln, when I'd rather just type Köln (which renders here as as KÃln). There's a LOT of characters that don't show correctly:

(note that some of these characters are required to correctly spell ENGLISH words also... æ in Encyclopædia or loanwords that we don't really have any alternative for, such as façade... so it's not even a decent excuse for them to say that Slashdot is primarily English speaking.)

AutoHotkey [autohotkey.net]. You can write a macro that will watch what you type, and if the foreground window is your web browser (and optionally, if you're on/.) then it can replace any key you define with any arbitrary string. I haven't tried but I expect that apostrophe replacement is trivial. There are also macros that will drop the string <a href="CLIPBOARD-CONTENTS"></a>" at the current cursor position, leaving the cursor between the tags; and now that I've had to do it by hand, I suspect I can also f

Unfortunately the app you linked to is Windows only. If I had the patience, I'd find an app (or make one myself) to do it on my preferred platforms, but since Slashdot is the ONLY site I have this problem with, it would be quite minimal gain. Also, I'd prefer the problem was fixed than creating a workaround anyway - if you work around problems, there's less incentive for a real fix anywhere down the line.

"Encyclopedia" is a 'non-englishy' spelling (in fact, my auto spell checker is underlining it in red right now)... It's an American spelling, and while I've certainly seen it, I really don't like it. I don't think I've ever seen "façade" spelled as "facade" though.

Do you also write "cafe" instead of "café"? Or how about naïve?

I agree about Unicode being important, but it's not so much because "Umlauts rock", but rather that it's just handy to be able to spell things the way they should

but if I were to talk about the place names "in general" (as I would do here on Slashdot for example), I'd write "KÃbnhavn", "KÃln" and "MÃ¼nchen".

silly question, do you refer to japan as 'Nihon-koku'? And when you do refer to place names like the above, how many people have to google it to know what the devil your talking about, since most of us don't speak german etc

When World of Warcraft bites the dust, you'll have a whole hell of a lot of people with 10gigs of data on their drives that does seemingly nothing. Thankfully, when that happens, it's a simple matter for the 11-million-some subscribers to switch over to a private server.

However, for fans of smaller, less popular MMOs, they're essentially screwed if their provider shuts down and nobody's reverse-engineered the server software.

I think it would be a good publicity stunt for the software companies if, when they shut down an MMO, they release the server software for private use. They don't necessarily have to open-source it since their own proprietary code might be re-used in future projects, but if they at least gave the die-hard fans a way to keep enjoying the game, they could build up an even more loyal following rather quickly.

WOW is a great game.... When it's free. For $15 a month it's a complete ripoff.

Utter bullshit. For $15/month WoW is probably the greatest entertainment bargain on the planet. Let's see... $15 gets you 2 movie tickets. Or a cheap dinner. Or you could rent a couple of videos. Any of which last a couple of hours.

Or it gets you a month of fun with friends. As much time as you care to spend online. Yeah, if you don't like the game, it isn't worth, but if you think is a "great game" then it's truly a bargain.

As I said "if you like the game". Of course if you don't like it, no, it isn't worth it. The original poster said that it was a great game... if it was free. All I'm saying is that IF you think it's a great game, $15 is a great bargain.

No rude people asking you for money.No people inviting you to parties constantly without asking you if you're interested.No people throwing insults at you when you decline their multiple duel requests.No people trying to scam you.No people shouting racist/sexist crap.

And the list could go on and on.

It's nice being able to experience the content of the game without being surrounded by assholes. I mean seriously, all of the above happened on a daily basis.

I'll give you the raids, but if killing a boss is something you feel you need to be able to share with someone for some sort of validation as if you've actually achieved something of worth, note or merit...

Saying there's "no reason to play"... Yes, there's no reason to play the thousands of quests designed to be soloed in the game, or simply for the enjoyment of seeing everything you've paid for without paying constantly to do it.

Well, maybe you're different from me, but to me, the ultimate measure of worth of ANYTHING you do is mostly based on how it affects other people. Hell, I can cook the best pasta bake EVER, and maybe I'd feel good about eating it myself, but it's worth far more to me if my wife thinks it's delicious than if it's just me that does.

As for "thousands of solo quests", all quests I've seen in WoW fall into a very few basic categories. I reckon there are about 3 quests in all of vanilla WoW: "Kill X of Y", "Get

Download the client. (Perfectly legal.) Download and run your own Mangos server. (Perfectly illegal.) Deprive Blizzard of money they don't need. I mean seriously NOBODY, ANYWHERE, needs to earn the $75+ million a month they make for their stupid little game.

WOW is a great game.... When it's free. For $15 a month it's a complete ripoff.

I can't remember if it was Will Wright or Sid Meier who said it, but one of those gaming legends said WOW was the best single player RPG they'd ever played.

I'm not a WoW player, but from a straight financial perspective, $15/month is equivalent to a lump sum of $3,600. That seems like a large amount, but it's your complete budget for setting up your own server; don't forget to charge a reasonable rate for the time you spend doing it. And before you go hog wild on the hardware, remember that all future upgrades need to be paid for from that same initial fund.

(To estimate a reasonable rate for your time, take your annual income and divide by the number of hou

Wow, way to pull numbers out of your ass! $15 = $3600? If you play for 20 years!!! The servers wont be up that long. The time value of money means you either 1) will have to pay a higher rate in the future or 2) will be paying effectively less over time (as the value of the $15 decreases.)

I think that you misunderstood my position. My thinking was that if you start with $3600, you can withdraw $15/month forever, not just 20 years. As I said, I'm not a player, but it seems safe to assume that dedicated players will continue to play for the rest of their lives, and forever seems like a good first-order approximation to someone's lifetime. GP seems to feel that $15 is too much to spend for something that they could replicate at home. I was just pointing out a logical limit to how much they

NOBODY, ANYWHERE, needs to earn the $75+ million a month they make for their stupid little game

Is that $75 million net or gross? If it is gross, how much of that goes to game development, server management, electricity, office space, salaries, paying back loans, taxes, etc. How much goes to shareholders?

"NOBODY, ANYWHERE" needs to earn more than a couple of thousand dollars a year. No on needs a car, a computer, a cell phone, electicity, a bed, or even a house. For over 100,000 years, hominids lived on the

I guess it might be nice if they open-sourced the software so that people could run their own servers... But I really have to kind of wonder what the point would be. What makes these games fun isn't the amazing engines or terrific game mechanics - its the players.

These days there's hardly any gopher servers out there (yes, I know there are a few) - so gopher clients aren't particularly useful.

Players move on to the newest, shiniest games out there. Without constant upgrades and expansions, players get bored pretty darn quick. And then your playerbase shrinks... There aren't enough people around to get groups or run raids... Which means less fun for the remaining players... And before too long there's nobody left to play with.

I suppose someone might pick up an open-sourced game server and expand/improve it enough to keep people playing... Might even do a good enough job to get people to pay for it... But I really have a hard time seeing any game living for terribly long after it's been abandoned by the original company.

I mean, there's a reason these games go under in the first place - they aren't making enough money because there aren't enough people playing them. Open sourcing the code might allow a few die-hard fans to keep playing... But the odds are pretty damn good the game will be dead (or close enough) before too long anyway.

And really, as an MMOG player myself, that doesn't bother me. Unlike a novel or a CD or something like that I don't feel that I'm purchasing an item when I buy an MMOG. I feel more like I'm joining a club... What I gain is the fun, experience, and memories of playing with other people. Not an item that I can revisit later on. It's like when you go on vacation to Mexico - what do you really have to show for your money when all is said and done? A few souvenirs maybe... Some photos... But the main thing you have are the memories of what you did.

I just wanted to write about a counter-point. Ragnarok has lots of private servers, and it still has quite the player base. It also allows server operators to tweak the server settings so that players get to pick server settings that most suit their taste. Note: I play WoW, used to play Ragnarok, and have friends who still play it.

I would generally say that if the original developers/company _offers_ the game (and/or the source) for free with no support, players will freely support it themselves. A community will form around the players who support the game, and the game will l

Sturgeon's Law applies to MMO players as strongly as it does anything else. 11 million players still means there are over 9 million crappy players.

And despite the moaning of everyone about WoW's playerbase, one of its biggest strengths is the fact that so many people play. MMOs benifit (or suffer) from extremely strong network effects. Try playing WoW on a very low-pop server, it's horrible unless all you want to do is solo quest. Switch to a high-pop server and the world comes so much more alive. Now if only they'd increase the server populations a little more... 2.5 - 3k concurrent at peak is only just starting to fill the world up.

They could stand to reduce the number of shards, but eliminating them is quite impossible with WoW's player-base size... that is, if you want to be able to do anything in capitol cities without your video card exploding.

Well it would be nice for some legal precedent to be set. There is a lot of unknowns about who owns what. Many MMO creators even claim ownership over the software you bought. So you may walk out of a store with cd's, a box, manuals, and some flashy pin-up art, but you really only bought a license?

You may be told you won an in game prize for a contest, but actually the developer owns your prize? What are they claiming you won, exactly?

You may be given in game cash as an incentive to return to a game, but it'

No, because the sword only has value as long as the MMORPG exists. As soon as the company closes up, the sword no longer exists. Also, the "contents" of the game don't actually belong to you (check the ULA). Through your subscription, you have a non-exclusive right to use the item.

The kids were able to be charged with theft because they used real world intimidation to take posession of something that had value on line.

This same thing happened with Auto Assault. It was a unique and genuinely fun MMO. It was akin to Steve Jacksons Car Wars, something I'd been waiting for for years.

I bought this game, subscribed, and played it for about 4 months. Unfortunately the game had no longevity, was fundamentally flawed design-wise, and went 'belly up' in about 6 months. I've still got the box and the CD and the manual. It's really a shame this game didn't get fixed and stay afloat because I love the idea of an MMO like this.

The MMO's may go belly up, and you can offer to buy it. But, the studio doesn't necessarily go belly up with it. In game advertising or, massive advertising across the ridiculous amounts of social networks may help.

The development of MMOs shows that we'll soon see this happen a lot more often.

MMOs have turned into the love child of VCs. They see the success of WoW, see what kind of a huge cash cow it is, and of course they want a slice of that cake. We will see a lot of MMOs pop up left and right in the near future. Actually, we do already see that happen.

Now, early MMOs were mostly a kind of game for a rather small audience, and they were developed as such. EQ, UO, let's not talk about Meridian, they didn't really expect millions of subscribers. And because of this, they aimed lower and already considered the game successful if it managed to break even, which, in turn, wasn't so terribly hard to do with lower expectations (from the players), lower cost of development and the "new kinda game" smell all over it, covering the stench of tedium.

We're now in a post-WoW world. And players have seen it. Love it or hate it, WoW is, from a purely playability and long term interest point of view, very successful. The world is big. The graphics are nice. The quests are easy but managable. Boring from time to time, but never as boring as many others were in so many other MMOs. And most of all, the game is very open end. You can't have it all. Even if you play constantly, have no life outside of it.

Now try to recreate that. Your problem, as a developer, is twofold. Your prospective players will judge you by the "fun" they have in WoW. Your VCs will judge you by the revenue of WoW.

Can you compete with that?

To make matters worse, you have to be different from all those hundreds if not thousands of other MMOs that are pumped into the market. So you have to be "new" in some way. Do you think EQ could even get a foot into the door today? Let's even give it up to date graphics, do you think it could? By today's standards it's boring, it's static, it's limited.

So the bar gets higher and higher for new MMOs. The cost rises as well. VCs want their money back. And the share you can cut out of the cake gets smaller and smaller with more and more competition.

So we'll see a fair lot of "small" MMOs fold. Often within their first year. We'll have to watch subscriber numbers closer, and be prepared to jump ship in time when we notice the game fails. I mean, who wants to "waste" his time building a character that's gone soon?

Which bears the question, why don't we just play to have fun? I mean, like we used to? Aren't games meant to be, you know, fun?

EQ ist still around because it needs little to no maintainance and is something Sony can sell as part of their... whatever they call that "all games pass" subscriber fee that encompasses all the dead horses they've been beating around for a while now, from EQ1 to 2 to Vanguard to Matrix Online.

I'm also fairly sure that's one of the venues their "subscriber numbers" come from. I mean, think you're playing EQ (or some other game), ponder quitting, see another game of those train wrecks Sony bought and drove

First, MMOs needn't be a competition. I play EvE. Mostly for myself. I'm in no competition, with no one. I interact with others, I buy and sell according to the market, I make some ISK by using the stupidity of other players against them, but I need neither have the biggest ship in the universe nor be the first to have some new equipment. I just play a game. I have a few ships that I use, I decide what I wanna do today, and generally it stays fun (with the tedium of scanning from time to time).

And how many of those zones are still being visited? Even if you started today, how many would you get to see (unless you deliberately went out of your way to go there)?

Don't get me wrong, every game has it, but I have the feeling it's especially bad in EQ, most likely because it has been around for so long. There are areas that have been the hunting ground for months and years which are virtually deserted today. For many reasons. Expansions that come out that make certain parts obsolete due to better loot

And that's the part I simply don't get. Yes, MMOs cost a lot. Many times more than what any single player game costs. And development takes a long time during which you don't see a penny from your investment. Quite the opposite, the closer you get to release, the more expensive the whole deal gets. Running a beta phase is costy.

So I can kinda understand that investors are crapping their pants over their investments and want to release as fast as possible. But usually that means killing off a game. WoW is su

"It would be great to see a dying company at least open up the server software, but how can we give them incentive to do so? "

Why would you want a game that by it's nature needs constant updates to be released? What's that you say? The community can release a constant stream of fresh and exciting content that will keep the people coming back for more. Wonderful. Type up a business plan. Oh wait.

Actually, in spite of the second law, some things can, in a sense, last forever.

One of the more entertaining information-theory problems in thermodynamics is demonstrating that a thinking entity is capable of an infinite number of thoughts, even though they have access to a finite amount of energy and are facing 2nd-law heat death.

This is an MMO that beta'd, died, came back with fan run and company verified servers, died again, came back under gametap, died yet again, and now maybe might come back with fan servers a second time.

At this point I doubt Cyan even owns Myst, Uru, or Plasma, the engine they bought and built up. I don't see any future where the fan's will get source code to the servers, or even the ability to run a server free of Cyan's control. Any company going belly up after investing millions obviously hasn't recoupe

I'm sure there is stupidity and greed standing in the way, but the obvious fix for this is to have one company acquire all of the failed games.

I know SOE has done this with several games (the Matrix, particularly) and is able to turn a profit even on very low subscription numbers because they already have all the infrastructure in place for their other games. The aggregator company could also gain leverage by selling access to multiple games for one price. For example, any two games for only $10/month, o

One goes out and buys specialized client software to access a service. One pays a monthly fee for the service. One uses the software to access the service. The service goes away. The software has no more use.

Where is the poblem? Go out and buy the client software for some other service if you really want that service.

Here, let me give you a real world comparison.

One goes out and buys a membership card to an exclusive club which allows entry without paying a cover charge. One pays a monthly fee to maintain one's membership. The club closes. The card no long has a use.

Here, have another:

One goes out and buys a membership card to gym which allows entry without paying a fee every time one wants to work out. One pays a monthly fee to maintain one's membership. The club closes. The card no long has a use.

Exactly what is it people are complaining about? Is it that the specialized client software they "bought" doesn't work with every other MMORPG? Or, are they just whining that they can't play the game anymore? I ask because the game is not the client. The game is the service run by the company. No company, no service, no game.

Should people who paid for a CompuServe client and subscription bitch and moan because they now can't use the software they bought?

To anyone who is whining about not being able to use the client for that MMORPG that folded, pay attention:

You bought software and got use out of it. You used it for what it was intended. You played the game. You had fun. But the company didn't make enough money to stay in business and now the game is over. The end. You were not cheated. They did nothing wrong. These things happen. Grow up, get over it, and get a life.

If gamers stop buying games that depend on a server to operate, especially those that insist on phoning home before playing even in single player mode, the companies will be forced to escrow the server source such that the shutdown of their servers triggers a 3rd party to release the code to the public (and in fact, creates a legal obligation to do so).

If they really don't want to run servers anymore and also don't want the source released, they'll have to make some sort of arrangement with someone to run t

It doesn't matter what you release when it's as horribly unfinished as AoC.

I hung on a lot longer than many, because I love so many things about that game, the setting, the brutality, the fast-based combat (even though they nerfed the original design of the combo system), the open PvP, and I think it has some of the best-designed outdoor zones in any MMO. They are realistic but still interesting, and some of the vistas are amazing.

They sold close to a million copies and PLENTY of people gave the game a try.

The problem was that they listened to you.

They did release AO2.

They just didn't copy the sci-fi setting but the horrible launch.

AoC for those who been there for AO know they AOC really stand for Anarchy Online Continued.

Dark&Light still holds the #1 spot in bad MMO launches, and Vanguard is a strong number 2, but AoC sure as hell gave both a run for their money. And Funcom sure as hell ain't a SOE who can survive with a do

At the store across the street, they're selling multiple copies of a particular MMO title that shutdown in 2007. Of course there's no indication on the box about this. No, it just says "First month of play free!"

It's only a few bucks. Not sure whether it's an actual deliberate ploy by the store to shift unwanted stock, or they simply just don't know it's shutdown.

Just because a game is MMO doesn't mean it isn't a fun single player experience. The way I see it, it just provides life to the world.

To be honest, I enjoy WOW just as much on my own private server (if not more so because I can engage in shenanigans that would get me banned from the official version like visiting forbidden places etc...) then I had online.

Only part that does suck obviously is the trading side. I miss trawling the auction house for bargains. But really, that and raiding aside, it's ostensibl

It's not that simple, I've been trying to get the source code [freegamedev.net] to the game hardwar, but without knowing who the copyrights belong to it would be illegal for the CEO of the old company (who lives 30 minutes away from me) to give it to me. In fact if the owner showed up and he had GPL'd or handed out the code he could be taken to court.

The law firm that sold the assets of the company knows but they want Â£250 to look through their records and find out the information.

Any game that requires a remote server under the control of a single third party has the same vulnerability. It's pretty much the same thing. And if you really think about it, these companies are using multiplayer as a form of DRM. I can copy WoW all I want, doesn't do me any good if I don't have an account.